Kitty Corp Meow Mix Forums

Hi! This tutorial is meant to help those who are completely new to rigging models, whether it's one you've built from scratch or a character that you're trying to port from another game.

At the moment you may find some parts to be a bit vague, so make sure to let me know which parts you get lost at.

 If you need to get a better view of anything just copy the image location and paste it in your browser or right click the image and click "view image".




For starters, you should have a skeleton from your target brawl fighter. There's already several tutorials for getting those, so I won't be covering how to get one here. Really, it's just a matter of downloading the character off mediafire and importing the DAE anyway.

Scaling Your Character and Your Skeleton
You'll want to scale your character uniformly down to the size of the skeleton so that your character is the right size. From here, begin to scale the skeleton's limbs to match your character's proportions.

Doing this, however, will cause you to need to use BlackJax's animation porter later. If you don't, I quote TommoPuppy saying that the result would be "a reverse Longchu effect" or just a Longchu effect depending on your character's proportions.

 It's best to change the skeleton as little as possible, but some models simply make this impossible. If you do manage to rig your character without changing the skeleton you will have a lot less headaches when the time comes to import.

First Steps
First off, you're going to select your character and add the skin modifier to it. If your character is made up of separate objects, add the skin modifier to each of the objects.

Remember, once you rig your character you can no longer edit the mesh. Doing so will cause all of your bone influences to be set to 0 in most cases, meaning all of your work will be reset. (Heck, even once during this tutorial I did this by accident and ended up having to redo an arm. This is why you should SAVE OFTEN!)

Next, you're going to go into your skin modifier and add every single bone in the scene to the list, so that every bone influences your mesh. This might sound strange if you have several parts to your model, but trust me, we'll sort it out after we get to the weighting section.

 If you try to move the skeleton at this point, you will notice that it may work relatively well, but there might be some vertices left behind, strange deformations (especially in the arms and legs), or bones affecting vertices they aren't supposed to.

Note: if your model is not following your skeleton at this point, then go under the vertex tab of your editable poly modifier and press Ctrl + A to select all vertices. Then click on the skin modifier once more. This will ensure that all vertices are affected by the bones, and you should see them follow as you move the rig around at this point.

Weighting the Mesh
These stretching problems are where the main bulk of the work comes from - weighting the mesh. Weighting the mesh is the process of picking what bones affect which vertices, so you will be making sure that the arm bone affects nothing but the arm vertices etc. as well as making sure that they deform correctly in places like the elbows, knees, and neck.

The first thing you're going to want to do is shift your focus to one area of the model at a time. I started with the head.

Click the Envelope sub-tab/sub-modifier of your Skin modifier. You should see a part of your model change color. If it does not, then scroll down to the list of bones and click one. The red area you see shows what part of the model that bone has control over, and it will fade out from yellow to blue to indicate how much influence it has over the vertices of the model.

If you're having trouble seeing your vertices, just press f4.

Red represents absolute control. The vertices that are red will follow the bone you have selected and nothing else.

Here we see that there's some vertex stretching on the back of the head. To fix this, we have to make sure that these vertices are 100% weighted to the head bone, meaning that they should be dark red.

This will not always be the case, as you will see for the arms, which you will see have varying degrees of color due to the amount of blending between bones needed for it to move naturally. More on this later.

With the Envelope sub-tab selected under the Skin modifier, you will notice a box labeled Select at the right of the screen. Check the "Vertices" box, as seen at the right side of the picture above. This will allow you to select the vertices of the mesh individually, so that you can begin weighting them. You'll probably always want to have this box checked.  You should also press f4 so you can get a better view of these vertices.

Next, select the problem vertices, in this case the vertices of the hair that are not following the head bone properly. Now open up the weight tool by clicking the wrench icon. You will need to scroll down a little bit, as indicated in this picture:
Since these vertices are only supposed to be affected by the head bone, we select the head bone (or in my case Bone04) in the list at the side and we click the square labeled "1" to set the weight to it's maximum of "1.0". This button will make sure that only the bone we have selected will move these vertices, and they should turn dark red to indicate this.

Notice those 2 pairs of "+" and "-" buttons? The top pair is going to be your most useful tool for tweaking the influence of the bones, specifically for the limbs.

Now that we've done that, no matter how much the other bones move, these vertices will not be affected by anything but the movement of our head bone. That was easy!  ;) The real challenge comes from tweaking the other bones (mainly the spine and the limbs) to deform naturally.

Character Deformations
Now that you know the basics of what it is we're doin', next I'm going to show you the basics of weighting an elbow, as well as show you some problems to look out for during the process.

First off, bend the arm at the elbow. You'll probably notice our problem immediately.
See how the arm's width on my model is smaller now that I bent the elbow? This deformation is exactly what we need to fix if we want natural looking animations.

Remember that pair of "+" and "-" buttons I talked about? Well these are going to be crucial for making this elbow bend correctly.

Careful, this part may get a bit confusing, as it's hard to put into words. As a general rule, the vertices the elbow will be bending at are going to be weighted heavily to the upper arm bone so that they do not move with the forearm bone. Depending on your character's proportions, this might cause some clipping, but this can either be completely fixed through some tweaking or at the very least it'll look a lot better than the arm caving in on itself demonstrated in the picture above.

Don't worry about the above too much, as you'll probably understand when you're actually fixing it yourself.

The vertices that are right in the nook of the elbow need to have a high influence by either the forearm or the upper arm. As we go back towards the outside of the elbow, we'll see a lot less red since the influences are mixed between the two bones.

 It's not as hard as you might think, but it does take a lot of patience, and you do sort of have to eyeball it. Here's what you're aiming for:

Again, those vertices towards the right of the screen are the ones that have close to 0.5 influence for the two bones, but the vertices of the nook of the arm are near 1.0 for their respective bones, creating a sharp crease.

Basically, we want a sharp crease at the nook, and a smooth blend towards the outside of the elbow so it looks like how a real elbow bends.

You'll know you're on the right track when you see very little change in the width of the arm as you bend the elbow back and forth.

Tweaking Specifics
 The legs are generally the same, but since they are so close together they might affect each other, creating some stretching.

If you run into this problem, select the bones of the right leg then the vertices of the left leg and click "0" in the weight tool box. Repeat this for the left leg bones and the right leg vertices.

The spine is generally very straight forward, and I doubt you'll have much trouble with it, as compared to the limbs.

Important! If you receive an error, it may have to do with your rig!
When you think you are finished, it is important to drag the root bone (or the bone that has influence over everything, usually located near the pelvis) pretty far in one direction to make sure there are no vertices that are not assigned to a bone.

 If you notice any vertices that begin to "lag" behind, then it's important to fix these right away. This is one of the most common reasons that you receive an error when you try to import the model into BrawlBox.

General stuff to keep in mind
Finally we move onto the fine tweaking. It's important that you put your character in a lot of extreme poses to see where the rig doesn't hold up. Since you're reading this you're probably the rigger as well as the animator, and it's important you know that your animations will not be as fluid as you want if you're always having to animate around the problems with your rig. If you're importing your character over an existing brawl fighter then this is especially true since the characters have already been animated without the weaknesses of your rig being considered, so be patient and be thorough when weighting your model.

Good luck!

This tutorial isn't finished, and is still going through a LOT of editing. Feel free to ask questions about parts that seem unclear!

Video tutorial coming soon.

Sweet. My armpit mikos willcome to life with this.

I sware I read that as "My Armpit milks"

Man.
This looks much cleaner.
I'll try it out later :vyse:

Thanks for the guide! I'll try this when I can actually read it ;~;. Just had my eyes dialated and cannot read anything. Sorry if there are any typo's in this message.

You're fine, Ian :P
No typos.

I'll try this out after I get 2010 installed.

Definitely gonna try this out. Thanks so much for the tutorial!

So after all the rigging is done, do you just export it like normal and import it? Or are there any extra steps you need to take to make sure everything is finished?

SANAE. WHY ARE YOU SO HARD TO WORK WITH.

Reimu was a bit easier, at least, until it crashed :srs:

EDIT: Looking back, I don't really get it. I think I was doing to wrong thing with Reimu. :(

EDITEDIT: Does the fact that I don't really get this mean that I'm dumb? I feel like this is simpler than it appears to me.

Not at all!

Don't worry about it, I'll make a video tutorial by some time next week. :laugh:


Yep, use all the specs from the opening post of BlackJax's thread and you should be good to go. No extra steps needed.

Is it unusual that the LLegJ and LKneeJ Vertices are inside my character's left foot? Same thing for the right side with the vertices at the right... The bones are located in the right places, however, so I don't understand why the vertice is on the feet rather than the legs... How can I move it so it would be on the leg?

I've gotten this far:

But, where I (I'm new to 3dsMax) am lost is, here:

What exactly do you mean by "Add the skin modifier to it"?

Well, first you click your model, then you go to the modify tab. You see where it says Cube, Cylinder and all those other forms? That means you're in the create tab. The modify tab is one to the right of that. From here you can choose to add modifiers. Click the drop down list and scroll down until you see "Skin". Click that. Hope that helps!

... Thanks. XD

Tomorrow I'll figure out what did you mean by applying the Skin Modifier separately, 'cause I had 6 Objects selected at once and did it, and it seems to have applied. .-.;

Hold on. I'm seeing pictures of people rigging models, but the models don't have their own bones to begin with.

My model is from MMD, so it has bones set up and everything. Am I supposed to delete them first and then go on with your tutorial?

Oh, that'll work too. Just make sure after you do that, you right click the italicized Skin modifier and hit "make unique"


Well there is one thing you could try first since your model is already rigged. (The character is rigged right? They actually move with the bones? If not then just delete them and get the brawl bones.) You could rename the bones that the character already has to the same names as your target brawl character and make dummy bones in 3ds max for all the ones that are missing (such as TopN) and use the Animation Porter from there.

If you don't like the results or you run into some sort of problem then you can just delete those ones and rig the character to the brawl fighter's bones directly, which will usually lead to cleaner results if done correctly.

lolwoot. Hope your idea works.

But one more question. What if the model I'm using already has more bones than the Brawl skeleton? What should I do with the extra bones?

Oh you can leave them in there. Brawl will ignore them when animating, and they'll just move with the parent bone.

So if your character had a ponytail (and you weren't importing over zerosuit samus) then the ponytail would move rigidly with the head bone. If you wanted it to move realistically, all you would need to do was animate the ponytail in all the animations. The arms, legs, etc. would already be done for you.

Basically I'm saying having more bones means that the extras could be animated manually for a cooler effect, but you can just leave them as they are if you wanted to.

Whoo, you helped me a lot. Thanks a bunch.

EDIT: y u no have "Tutorial Writer" award. :srs:

Hm. BlackJax's animation porter? I wasn't aware such software existed. How does it work?

You're welcome!  :)


Because I'm not working HARD enough :srs:

Doesn't bother me. :laugh:


I'll get back to you on that one. It's really easy, but I actually kinda forgot, and I have school today.

I can't select the vertex's and make them weight to the bone D:

I can only draw it lol

Hm...Finished this tutorial with a T-posed model with Brawl Bones, but when I get to test it with a FitMotionEtc.PAC, the model is all messed up, even though I've followed this tutorial step by step. I wonder why...

Just wondering, If you are rigging a model to brawl bones.   If you rotate the bones in 3DS, will they be rotated in brawl box when you export them?

Sorry, I don't understand the problem. You can only paint the weights is what you're saying?


Yes, although you've probably already figured that out since I answered so late :laugh:

Edit: Oh, how about that. Thanks for the award!

how about the hipN and transN control?

Ooh, problem, problem.

I followed your "First Steps" to get my model to follow the skeleton, but it doesn't.
I've added every bone to every object (didn't follow bones), then did the vertices selecting thing (didn't work either).
What do?

I couldn't select the vertex like you did O.o
I believe you "dragged" them inside the "box" and take them at that way, but I couldn't ;_;
however, the only thing I could select them with is with the "Paint weight tool"
little hard to control if I miss one vertex but pretty good x3

Read the tutorial a bit closer. You need to check the "Select Vertices" box before you can do that.


If they're all selected like you say then try hitting the weight tool and setting the weight to 1.0 on one of the bones, then see if it follows that one.

that's the weird part, It's already in but I still cant select it O_o
but I might been used a bad model however.

some more questions that I dont understand.
1. lets say the model and the root is not at the same place
(http://i43.tinypic.com/ny8msg.png)
this did affect the model when I export it first time but it didn't had any bones.
will this affect the model even if I add it a bone struckture? if it will affect the model even after I add the bones, how can I change them so it are the same place as XYZ are?

2. lets say my model mewtwo has over 20 object?
how should I do about the bonething? should I select every object in one swept and add skin and when bone to it?
or should I select each object piece by piece and add skin and when bones?
if I should do it piece by piece, do I need to add every single bone to each of the objects or only the ones that I need? O.o

a response ASAP should be great :3

I've got a few probs on my own that I would like to get help to rig them.  First off, I followed your tutorial with a T-posed model, but it heavily gets deformed once rigged and transfered to Brawl, and I dunno why. It has Snake's bones and the only bones unused are the Bandana ones, since the new character has no bandana. Secondly, when I try testing him with BrawlBox along with a FitMotionEtc file, all the deformaions can be seen when an animation is chosen, then played. Eyesores! Last, one of my 2 models doesn't seem to have any vertices, but it worked before, so I don't undestand why...

As for the model deforming in Brawl, do I need the 'Animation Porter' to fix this? Where can I find it, and how does it works? I need an answer as soon as possible, please.

The animation porter is in BrawlBox. :srs:
I have no clue how many times people have said that.

Thanks for the info! I can delete my thead in the Help section since I know that now. But, how do I access the Animation Porter, and how does it works?

Well, you first load up a FitMotion.pac with your character.
Import the animation to your character, then fix it using the MDL0 of the character the animation game from.
Example, to give Mario Captain Falcon's waiting stance, you import the stance into Mario's FitMotion, export Falcon's MDL0, then, while in BrawlBox with Mario, you'd right click the animation you wanna fix and click something like "Fix animation" or something, then load Falcon's MDL0.
That's how you port animations.

I tried with every single animations, then saved the FitZeldaMotionEtc (since I wanted to port Zelda's animation on Sheik), put it on my SD card in SHeik's folder, but my Wii crashes when I try loading Sheik...

My hat's off to you, sir. Nice quicktorial right there.


That could be a lot of things. It works fine without the animations? The file size isn't too much?

Would it matter that my polygons have "Edit Poly" instead of "Edit Mesh"? I mean, I followed BJ's video tutorial at first, but looking around the web shows that some people used "Edit Mesh" at first so they could rig bones.

Disregard that.

But I still can't get my model to follow the bones. Am I supposed to turn the model into a single mesh again?

No, that wouldn't solve anything. You don't have an edit mesh/edit poly on top of the skin do you? He only did that in the tutorial because he was separating the materials. The skin is ALWAYS on the top. After you separate it by the mat IDs, you should have nothing above the skin.

Thanks for the response!   

Hopefully you can help me with my problem I am having...


Okay so you know how in your tutorial, you start off with rigging the head. I did that! head moves fine...  but then i move onto other stuff, like say the the spine.  The spine should effect the top half of the body right?  so i make it do that,  but now the head bone isn't rigged how it was before. In fact it doesn't move the head at all anymore, The spine bone has completely taken over.

So i thought i should do biggest to smallest, Starting with the waist -> then the bust -> then the head. VOILA! it worked.... but then I start editing the ears...  after completing the ears... the head no longer moved them. and the waist no longer moved the head...  IT just keeps forgetting what i did the previous step or rather it over-wrights it.

What am I doing wrong here?  Is it impossible to have something be completely moved by two separate bones? or are you only aloud to have ONE thing control everything?

It very frustrating ;-;

I have it as:

• +Skin

+Edit Poly

I guess that's what you mean by skin on top? If I click the Edit Poly, there's a small warning saying that the dependent modifier is Skin.

I followed BJ's video tutorial by the book video.
Mm, I really need to find out what's going wrong. I guess I should wait for your video tutorial.

Well, the size of the FitZeldaMotionEtc.pac with animations ported to Sheik is 4358 KB. Of course I renamed it FitSheikMotionEtc when I put in onto my SD card. Any other solutions?

Yes, that warning means if you continue and modify something in the edit poly it'll reset your skin, so hopefully you haven't been doing that. Also you have the lightbulb on for skin right?


Not sure, sorry. I actually haven't gotten around to animation importing just yet. If somebody still hasn't figured it out by that point then I'll do some tests of my own and try to find the problem. My current project shouldn't take too long.

If I'm not mistaken, I took a peek at my MotionEtc's animations, and they STILL require Zelda's bones to work. Wasn't the Animation Porter supposed to change Zelda's bones for Shiek's in this MotionEtc file? Or only the MDL0 got affected? I need help, this so confusing...

Yeah, the bulb is there. Would you mind if I send you my .max file so you can see what I'm doing wrong?

Not at all, send it on over! It'd probably be better than just guessing :laugh:

Unfortunately I have work in 15 minutes, so I probably won't be able to get back to you on that for 7 hours...

can you answer my question soon? D:
wanna continue on mewtwo!

Justin, I have trouble with rigging a model, as sometimes, incorrect bones appears in the wrench thing while the bone I need isn't there. I tried out the tutorial for a T-posed character, but it ended up being a failure in Brawl. Can you please help me? I have at least 3 models to rig, and I'm stuck after placing the bones...

quoted so i don't get forgotten ;-;

Hahaha okay, I'll PM you guys in 3 hours.

I can hardly wait =D

I hope I get PMed, too. So much difficulties to deal with...

I dont have to get PM or something, I figured it out :3

If only I could figure out my problem. :srs:

Good question. In order to add weight to a bone that isn't in the weight tool window, you actually have to click the bone on that huge list of bones under the skin modifier, then click a number in the weight tool window. That bone will then be added to the smaller list in the weight tool window, and you can continue to tweak the weights. Hope that makes sense.

No no no no no no no.

Argh, the weighting is going to kill me. My model has WAY too many vertices to edit. The hair alone has over 1000. :srs:

EDIT: Ooh, I read somewhere that I had to scale the bones, not move them in order to align them with my model. Is that true?

Thanks, but my models STILL get deformed in Brawl even after those edit. Mind if I send you the model I'm working on?

Yo justin, I tried downloading a legal installer through the 'student' thing at autodesk.com. I uninstalled both max 8 and 10 and everything related to them, then reinstalled 10 but not 8. now the importing of DAE's work, except I get this error.

(http://i55.tinypic.com/2ibgevq.jpg)

I have a feeling my problem isn't the uv's entirely, cause I deleated the polygon that was the 'toon outline' around the dangos and they were textured properly on anko's model.
Maybe Max just can't seperate the toon outline textures from the normal ones?

I dunno which one it was. but I am having severley less problems with this. I am now using MAX 2011 and BrawlBox exported bones rather than MAX 8 and AiS exported bones.

Justin, I know this seems odd, but I've followed your tutorial from A to Z with a T-stanced character, just because it's eaier to start with. However...once uploaded in Brawl it gets completely deformed. Same thing when I test animations with BrawlBox and a FitMotionEtc file. Somehow I feel like this problem is only happening to me, and I don't know how to fix it... if you or someone else could help me with the problems I have, that would be nice.

you forgot to mention what bones dont need rigging

I can't get 3DS Max, since it's stupidly expensive. I found a program called GMax, which someone said "is made for making game mods." Can I use that?

coughpiratecough
Or go to the student version of the 3DS Max site.

Okay, I am having serious issues editing the envelopes on the skin modifier =-=

Would Physique work also with this method for brawl importing?

Well I'm screwed then =-=
Cause the envelope editing in the skin modifier on my max 10 is [censored]ed up like hell

I'll make a copy of my file and try it in 11....

My models are always deforming, even after weighting the mesh and vertices. Also, must I move the bones inside the model or leave them as they are (do not touch the bones)?

Uh....where are the bones SUPPOSED to be in a real body without hurting it....
I mean really....
If the mesh is your body.....

see where I'm going with this? Why else would they be called BONES.... =-=

My issue is weighting the Top N bone to have absolute control (red) all over the entire polygon for all polygons.

Legs and Feet: Mostly all dark red
Torso: Mostly red with some yellow
Arms/hands: for some odd reason mostly blue with some yellow =-=
Kunai(Both left and right): Mostly red but with some yellow
Eyeglasses(The glass polygon): All red (which is weird)
Eyeglasses(The Rims Polygon): Haven't tried yet
Face/neck Polygon: Haven't tried yet
Eye Polygon(It's all one flat eye like brawl models): Haven't tried yet
Hair Polygon: Haven't tried yet
Ponytail Polygon: Haven't tried Yet

The Top N bone is supposed to move everything right? So in Max All my Vertexes should be completely red when I select that bone for said polygon :l or am I doing it wrong?

Note, I'm going with the top N first cause well, it's the most basic of all brawl bones, if I can't rig this right I don't stand a chance at rigging it right on any of the other bones.

You don't have to weight the TopN bone or the TransN bone, apparently.

Start with the XRotN, then work your way down the list.

Well, I don't think I qualify for student version, and I can't find a coughtorrentcough that mcafee doesn't find a virus in, except i might have, but i haven't started dl yet

All right, this is confusing  :-\    I have a bone-rigged model, but it still gets deformed even after weighting the vertices. For example, the hands' vertices only contains the Hand and Have bones while each respective finger has only their own finger bones rigged in the vertices, but in the 4 first animations of BrawlBox (hand animations) they still get deformed... I need help, really.

Dude, the only qualification is having a valid email address :srs:

Also I have a non-virus infested *cough*pirate*cough* torrent of  max 8 on my mediafire

I guess I'll ignore the top N then :af2:

But I'll post if I have any more problems =-=

Don't quite know how to say this but....

I have a model of Auron.... with bones and all.
However, he's unarmed.
I extracted a weapon for him to use already which has it's own bones.... and I don't know how to attach it to one of Auron's bones.
Auron has Joint 63 already which he uses in FFX as RHaveN.
How would I go about attaching it?

Here's the scene for better understanding.
http://www.mediafire.com/?j1daetldrx2rxap

Skin modifier is present on the objects by default..... hmm..

Thaaaaat's me!

So, um, how exactly do I make it so I can see the imported skeleton? I'm guessing this is a ridiculously novice question but this is my first time working with 3DS Max and basically my first time working with any 3D modeling software (I've only used Google Sketchup in the past to make models) so I really have no idea what I'm doing.  If I draw new bones I can see them just fine but the imported skeleton only shows up when I rotate the camera and then disappears again when I stop.
I'm poking around the UI trying to figure it out myself, of course, but I'm a bit bamboozled as this kind of thing is so new to me.


EDIT: the skeleton is magically visible, now--no idea why.

Uhm...what exactly is 'rigging' a model..? Is it required in the process of importing models?

I think it means that you get the model to follow the bones.

 :>.>:

Say.... should normals be a part of this tutorial?

I'm completely new to rigging models and I got all my info from this tutorial (and the other by Beyond). I have no problems so far importing a Baby Luigi model from Mario Kart Wii over Luigi other than slight distortion in the arms and scale size to fit the bones.

My problem occurs into rigging the model. Baby Luigi already has bones that I deleted from Mario Kart Wii, so he mostly rigs fine (well, in my view) when it comes to bending his arm (the right one specifically). However, a distortion occurs in the side of the cap and the face where the arm is. I don't know how to fix this...I tried decreasing the weight of the vertices affected and no improvements occur and the red areas affected by it seem to stay that color. Please help, I would greatly appreciate it.  :(

It's impossible for me to follow this tutorial.You don't explain how to add bones to the list or scale bones,etc. so I can't follow this because I'm not familiar to 3DS Max,I want to import Pachirisu and I can't :(

when i jump ingame there is severe stretching, and when he moves, how can i fix it?

Question about bending limbs, heads, etc. Obviously, when you export the rigged model as a .dae file, it needs to be a T-pose. What I want to know is, once you're done rigging/weighting the vertices, is there an easier way to reset the bones' positions to their original axis without losing your work (which would be Ctrl+z)?

What if I'm using Mario's Bone Tree?

Guess people aren't responding to this thread.

The forums are pretty dead in general, unfortunately. The fastest way to get help is to pm the experts. Find some users that are good at importing and ask them for help. Send pics if necessary. You won't always get a respond, but I've had a few nice users that were kind enough to help me with several of my problems. This is honestly the fastest way to learn, especially when you have simple questions like that. I replied to your question on the other topic btw.

When pm'ing for help, be polite. Since they're busy, keep in mind they probably won't give you detailed answers. They often give you broad answers that require you to do your own research. When they answer your question, don't press them to give you more details unless it's simple and/or you absolutely can't figure it out yourself. If you flood them with questions, they may ignore you. Speaking of which, try to keep your questions short and simple.